Introducing AI Phishing Coach: Personalized, Autonomous Security Awareness Training

In talking to our own customers, we often hear that current security awareness training programs struggle to meaningfully change employee security behaviors.

In a recent survey of 300 security practitioners and leaders, 74% of CISOs and CIOs said traditional security awareness training fails to significantly improve their organization’s security posture. While cyber insurance providers and regulatory bodies dictate the necessity of security awareness training programs, in many cases, many organizations find that these programs are more of an operational burden than a true security asset.

There are three core issues behind this failure:

• Phishing simulations are not targeted enough to prepare employees for real attacks.

• Training content is irrelevant or outdated, making it a checkbox in the minds of most employees rather than education worth retaining.

• Programs demand constant oversight. Creating and adjusting simulations and training content takes hours of manual work.

Abnormal’s newest product, AI Phishing Coach, introduces a fundamentally different approach to solve these challenges. AI Phishing Coach uses behavioral AI and real attack data to deliver personalized, autonomous, and effective training. This is not one-size-fits-none training as usual. This is abnormally different.

In developing this product, we spoke to dozens of our own customers and found that one of the most significant weaknesses cited in traditional phishing simulations is their reliance on pre-built templates and general intelligence that fail to reflect the actual threats targeting individual employees day-to-day.

Without a true understanding of the attacks targeting your organization and your employees on an individual basis, there is no way to know if the emails being delivered by traditional phishing simulation platforms actually reflect the threats your employees may be targeted by in the wild.

AI Phishing Coach changes that with personalized phishing simulations based on employee-specific threat data.

Through Abnormal AI’s secure API integration, AI Phishing Coach leverages organizational context—such as job function and typical communication patterns—to better tailor training. This means employees are tested and trained on the kinds of attacks they are likely to actually see in the wild.

This starts by analyzing real, remediated threats in Threat Log. Attacks are selected and defanged to be sent to each employee as simulations based on:

• Employee role and responsibilities

• The types of attacks targeting an employee and their peers in similar roles at the organization
  

• Previous training engagement and trends (i.e. role-specific sensitivity to threats, prior simulation outcomes, noted behavioral changes, etc.)
  

Simulations are then delivered automatically to employees on a monthly basis and adjusted as user risk changes. For instance, actions a user takes when they receive a simulation are also tracked to better understand employee risk over time, enabling AI Phishing Coach to deliver simulations that align to evolving user behaviors: whether positive reporting actions, neutral actions such as when a user reads the simulation, and of course, when a user interacts by clicking the phishing link.

Once an employee clicks and fails a simulation, AI Phishing Coach responds with personalized, AI-crafted just-in-time coaching.

To automate and consistently deliver on this end-to-end process, a unique coaching strategy is developed for each employee, based on roles, threat landscape, and prior training engagement—ultimately using the same organizational insights that are used to build the simulations.

Based on this understanding, AI Phishing Coach generates and delivers feedback when a link is clicked in the phishing simulations, explaining:

• What the employee could have looked for in the email to identify the simulation as a threat

• Why the specific simulation was relevant to that employee and their role

• How they can be more vigilant in the future and next steps to follow (i.e., reporting the simulations, contacting the security team, etc.)

This just-in-time content is timely, contextual, and written in a tone that’s meant to be helpful, not punitive—making it more likely to be read, understood, and retained.

This tight feedback loop between simulation and coaching is designed to enhance real threat recognition skills over time for every employee.

Annual training can often be a painful experience for employees. It can feel like a checkbox or a distraction. This is because current content feels irrelevant. Many training programs use generic content that often does not align with employee roles, industry nuances, organizational structure, or the threats the employees actually face on a daily basis. As a result, even when training is completed, the lessons may not translate into more secure decisions.

AI Phishing Coach takes a different approach. Because it uses organizational and user behavioral context, it generates content that feels targeted and useful.

AI Phishing Coach automatically creates annual training content for your organization with minimal input.

This process works by:

• AI Phishing Coach autonomously analyzing your organization’s brand identity, industry nuances, and threat landscape
  

• Using that context to build a unique training strategy based on Abnormal’s understanding of your organization and to guidance aligned with CIS, NIST, and other key security frameworks
  

• Finally, a professional, custom-branded training video is automatically generated

This content is also SCORM-compatible, meaning it can be delivered through Abnormal or exported to your preferred LMS—and because the videos are AI-generated, they can be easily updated to stay relevant each year as threats and security trends change.

Running a phishing simulation program at scale is no small task. Security teams are often responsible for content creation, delivery logistics, response tracking, and report generation—on top of every other initiative they’re managing.

AI Phishing Coach is designed to operate autonomously. The platform uses agentic AI designed to manage the fundamental stages of a security awareness training program: creating personalized simulations, delivering just-in-time coaching, generating long-form training content, and adapting based on user behavior over time.

While many traditional security awareness training platforms offer extensive customization, we’ve heard from customers that additional knobs and dials add more of a burden than a benefit. AI Phishing Coach aims to solve a long-standing challenge: delivering relevant, timely training content and delivering the right simulation to the right user without relying on static template libraries.

AI Phishing Coach is designed to deliver targeted training and to run itself—freeing up your team to focus on strategic programs like live workshops, executive briefings, or employee engagement campaigns.

This shift from manual execution to intelligent automation affords organizations the opportunity to scale their training without scaling their workload.

Many traditional security awareness training platforms were developed solely to satisfy compliance requirements. This resulted in programs that felt generic, outdated, and were operationally burdensome—delivering limited value in the face of evolving attacks. And while these programs may satisfy auditors, security leaders seek solutions that focus on real employee education and are better aligned with modern threats.

AI Phishing Coach is designed to meet this goal by transforming real threats into personalized training experiences, providing context-aware coaching, and delivering dynamically generated, relevant content, to not only help meet your compliance objectives but build a more resilient security culture.

This is a more human-centric approach by way of AI, designed to drive real behavior change.

To learn how AI Phishing Coach can elevate your training program and reduce risk across your organization, talk to your Abnormal representative or request a personalized demo today.